By Bijal Shah

Just about all outcomes of the enforcement of law, whether beneficial or concerning, are to some extent the result of administrative discretion. In her insightful new article, Misdemeanor Declination: A Theory of Internal Separation of Powers, Professor Alexandra Natapoff expertly illustrates that this is as true in criminal administration as anywhere else. In particular, Natapoff identifies and evaluates an important moment of discretion in the administration of criminal law: a prosecutor’s decision whether to decline or file formal criminal charges after police have made an arrest. This invited response both appreciates Natapoff's enthusiasm for enhancing prosecutorial discretion in criminal administration and maintains a bit of skepticism regarding its efficacy. More specifically, it draws on the immigration context in order to explore the possibilities and hazards of internal administrative checks for constraining excessive policing in both the criminal and immigration environments. First, this response suggests that directives ensuring uniformity are important to ensuring high-quality prosecutorial discretion. Second, it argues that agency culture is an important player in the internal separation of powers that reduces prosecutors’ overarching potential to constrain law enforcement. Third, it observes that the declination decision can serve a gatekeeping function that limits desirable access to adjudication, particularly for communities with fewer resources and reduced participation in democratic process. Finally, this response notes the possibilities of institutional design and public oversight for improving law enforcement accountability.

Texas Law Review Online, Volume 103, 2024, Boston College Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No. 639, 15p.

By Stephen Webb

As immigration rises to the top of voters’ concerns, a major new Policy Exchange report examines why governments of both parties have found it so hard to get the numbers down, and what policies would be needed to achieve this. 

The report, written by Stephen Webb, a former Home Office director and with foreword by The Honourable Alexander Downer AC, former Foreign Minister of Australia, sets out the incentives in the system that have led to consistently high migration. These include the power of the pro-immigration lobby, mixed incentives within Government, and a human rights case law that has consistently moved in a more liberal direction over the past 30 years. It notes that the problems we are facing in the UK are increasingly shared by other European countries.   

The report exposes that at least £11m is being spent by NGOs with a focus on migration issues on research, analysis and lobbying – with a further £30m in taxpayer funded grants to universities, most of which have a clear tilt towards liberal immigration policies. 

The report argues that the policy response needs to change the incentives, whether they be on migrants themselves, employers and renters, other government departments and third countries who do not cooperate on returning their nationals. The report recommends: 

An auction system to allocate a limited number of work visas to ensure they go to the highest quality candidates, with the proceeds used to increase wages in the care sector,A system of ‘sureties’ which impose a penalty on visa holders if they do not leave on timeIllegal migrants to know they will not be allowed to settle in the UK, but will be transferred to safe accommodation on Ascension IslandTougher laws to block visas and overseas aid going to countries that do not cooperate in returns of their nationalsMuch tougher penalties for those employing and renting accommodation to people without the right to be in the UK.A cross European coalition to reform the ECHR, with a willingness to leave if this is not delivered 

In a foreword to the report, former Australian Foreign Minister, The Honourable Alexander Downer AC, said: 

“The issue of immigration has become one of the most contentious on the Western world…so far few countries have managed the issue well…but the British immigration system is a particular shambles… 

A British government will have sooner or later to get control of the immigration program.  If they fail to do so, we can be sure populists and extremists will get elected who promise to do it.”

London: Policy Exchange, 2025. 85p.

By Human Rights Watch

This has been a year of elections, resistance, and conflict, testing the integrity of democratic institutions and the principles of international human rights and humanitarian law. Whether in response to heightened repression in Russia, India, and Venezuela, or catastrophic armed conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, governments around the world are being called upon to demonstrate their commitment to human rights, democracy, and humanitarian action. Many have failed the test. But even outspoken and action-oriented governments have invoked human rights standards weakly or inconsistently, feeding global perceptions that human rights lack legitimacy. That is an irresponsible and dangerous conclusion, and conveniently absolves governments of their legal obligations to uphold international human rights law both at home and in their actions abroad. Reflecting on the events of 2024, this is not a moment to retreat from the protections needed by everyone everywhere. Instead, governments should respect and defend universal human rights with more rigor and urgency than ever, and people and civil society need to remain steadfast in holding them accountable. The Power of Popular Resistance Elections need to abide by human rights standards, but elections are never an end in themselves. While rigged and otherwise unfair elections are a sign of more rights violations to come, even free and fair elections don’t necessarily mean a rights-respecting future. Although over 70 countries conducted national elections in 2024, their full impact on human rights will only be felt in what follows. Racism, hate, and discrimination drove many elections in the past year. In the United States, Donald Trump won the presidency for a second time, raising concerns that his new administration would repeat and even magnify the serious rights violations of his first term. Likewise, in the European Parliament elections of 2024, far-right parties made significant gains, exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment and nationalist rhetoric to advance policies that threaten minority communities and undermine democratic norms. Yet elsewhere, there was meaningful democratic resilience, as voters proved unwilling to accept populist agendas and held leaders and their parties accountable. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hate speech on the campaign trail did not win him the electoral majority he craved, showing that even in the face of systemic challenges, democracy can still put a check on power. Authoritarian leaders tightened their grip on power in countries such as Russia, El Salvador and the Sahel nations of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, leveraging fear and misinformation to stifle dissent.

Our Annual Review Of Human Rights HumanRights Watch, 2025. 554p

By Stacey Cutbush, Leanne McCallum Desselle, Melissia Larson, Brianna D’Arcangelo

The past decade has seen a rapid increase in efforts to combat human trafficking. This rush has led to disparate approaches when developing programs and providing service, creating a fragmented landscape in which service providers have varying levels of preparedness and capacity. Subsequently, the services rendered to survivors of human trafficking are varied and uneven. To remedy this, there is a pressing need for a landscape analysis of existing standards in the field to inform the creation and adoption of unified standards of care (SOCs), ensuring a cohesive, consistent, and robust service response to survivors of human trafficking.

In recent years, there has been a growing demand from practitioners, evaluators, and researchers for unified SOCs in the anti-trafficking field. These stakeholders have expressed a need to establish principles, guidelines, or frameworks for service delivery to support their efforts. Establishing a cohesive, consistent, and robust framework that can be utilized across the field will benefit anti-trafficking efforts. Building on this momentum, the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) and the Office of Trafficking in Persons (OTIP) have issued a call to action to develop unified SOCs for human trafficking service providers. As part of this multi-phase initiative, Freedom Network USA received a competitive award to the lead the development of SOCs and will convene an SOCs Technical Working Group (SOC TWG) to identify, adopt, adapt, and/or develop SOCs for human trafficking service providers.

RTI’s purpose in this project is to conduct a literature review by reviewing and synthesizing all existing literature related to human trafficking SOCs. This literature review will provide the SOC TWG with a foundational understanding of the current state of the field. Additionally, the insights derived from the literature review will guide the process and criteria for the TWG’S identification, adoption, adaptation, and/or development of SOCs in response to OVC-OTIP’s call to action. 

Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI, 2023. 20p. 

By Marcin Rojszczak

This book discusses contemporary standards of legal safeguards in the area of bulk electronic surveillance from the perspective of the European legal model. Bulk, or untargeted, surveillance, although traditionally associated with the interception of electronic communications, is increasingly used as a convenient tool for collecting information on large groups of society. The collection of redundant information, which is intrinsic to bulk surveillance, is no longer a side effect but an important objective of the use of bulk powers. As a result, untargeted surveillance is everywhere increasingly being implemented, and without any clear link to state security or crime-fighting objectives. This work examines the origins of untargeted measures, explores their mechanics and key concepts, and defines what distinguishes them from other forms of surveillance. The various elements of the legal safeguards in place, which are fundamental to protecting individuals from the risks of abuse of power, are analysed in detail. The book discusses not only the different standards of legal safeguards, but also gives examples of their implementation in individual European countries. It also examines the relationship between the development of the global data market and untargeted surveillance powers, in particular in the context of the risks associated with algorithmic surveillance, client-side scanning, the privatisation of surveillance – or surveillance as a service – and the increasingly widespread use of preventive content filtering mechanisms. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of law, international relations, public policy, engineering and sociology. It will also appeal to professionals dealing with various aspects of the use of surveillance measures, such as experts, members of the legislature and law enforcement agencies.

London; New York: Routledge, 2025. 290p.

By Hilary Francis

In recent years, child migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have made the perilous journey to the United States in unprecedented numbers, but their peers in Nicaragua have remained at home. Nicaragua also enjoys lower murder rates and far fewer gang problems when compared with her neighbours. Why is Nicaragua so different? The present government has promulgated a discourse of Nicaraguan exceptionalism, arguing that Nicaragua is unique thanks to the heritage of the 1979 Sandinista revolution. This volume critically interrogates that claim, asking whether the legacy of the revolution is truly exceptional. An interdisciplinary work, the book brings together historians, anthropologists and sociologists to explore the multifarious ways in which the revolutionary past continues to shape public policy – and daily life – in Nicaragua’s tumultuous present.

London: University of London Press, 2020. 198p.

By Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International

Amnesty International Kenya and Human Rights Watch document the abuses committed by police and other state agents during the 2023 nationwide protests. The opposition, Azimio La Umoja One Kenya Coalition, organized the protests over alleged fraud and malpractices during the 2022 elections, and against the high cost of living and tax hikes proposed by the new administration of President William Ruto. “Unchecked Injustice” is based on 224 interviews with survivors and witnesses to abuses in Nairobi, Kisumu, Machakos, Migori, Nakuru, Kisii, Nyamira, Homa Bay, Siaya, and Makueni counties. The report documents how police used arbitrary and excessive force against protesters between March-July 2023. They shot directly into crowds with lethal weapons and lesslethal “rubber bullets,” fired tear gas into residential areas and schools, and carried out violent and abusive house-to-house operations, beating and shooting residents, killing at least 31 people. The Independent Policing Oversight Authority, which provides civilian oversight of the work of the police in Kenya, recorded that at least 67 were killed during this period. The report also documents arbitrary arrests, detention, torture and other ill-treatment of people including children under 18, and the long-term health and socio-economic impact of abuses. Amnesty International Kenya and Human Rights Watch call on the Kenyan government to acknowledge, condemn and investigate the killings and use of excessive force by police, and hold to account those credibly implicated in abuses. The government should also introduce credible police reforms.

New York: Human Rights Watch, 2024. 96p.

By Human Rights Watch

The 175-page report, “‘I Learned How to Say No’: Labor Abuses & Sexual Exploitation in Colombian Webcam Studios,” exposes working conditions in webcam studios in Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, and Palmira, where models record content that is broadcasted by adult platforms and streamed around the world. Webcamming is a global industry in which studies estimate that platforms keep between 50 and 65 percent of what viewers pay. People interviewed said that studios retain as much as 70 percent of what is paid out by the platform, reducing the pay of workers. Adult webcam platforms based in the United States and Europe should immediately address labor abuses and sexual exploitation in Colombian webcam studios.

New York: Human Rights Watch, 2024. 285p.

By Michael Garcia Bochenek

In the last few months of 2017, public defenders working in United States communities along the US-Mexico border began noticing a pattern. Over several months, they had seen an increasing number of people facing criminal charges for irregularly crossing the border arriving in court with a new concern: When these people had a chance to speak in court, their primary worry was not that they were facing prosecution; instead, they were asking the judges where their children were. These public defenders were seeing the early days of the forcible family separation policy put in place by the administration of US President Donald J. Trump and developed in a larger context of overheated, dehumanizing, and at times racist official rhetoric toward migrants. The policy began in March 2017 as a pilot program in and around El Paso, Texas, and was then rolled out along the entire US-Mexico border in early 2018. The policy deployed a minor federal criminal charge—“improper entry”—to force children and parents apart. Its official name, “Zero Tolerance,” referred to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ directive that every adult who entered the United States irregularly would face prosecution. Criminal charges for improper entry have long been misused as a means of immigration enforcement, raising serious human rights concerns. More than five years before Sessions’ “zero tolerance” directive, improper entry and improper reentry were the most prosecuted federal crimes in the United States. As misguided and abusive as this earlier use of such charges was, it had not deliberately targeted children and their parents. In fact, before mid-2017, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) generally did not request prosecution of parents arriving with their children and federal prosecutors had usually declined to pursue improper entry charges against parents traveling with their children precisely to avoid separating arriving families. The policy developed at Sessions’ directive did not appear primarily aimed at securing convictions. Although a criminal conviction would mean more serious consequences on a subsequent irregular entry, the offense is, as a federal magistrate judge observed, “quite literally one of the least serious federal offenses.”1 The real payoff, as far as the architects of the policy were concerned, was that a criminal charge could be used as a reason to transfer the immediate responsibility for protective care of the child. Parents who faced charges were in the custody of the US Marshals Service. Their children remained in US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention. The parents were rapidly convicted—some spent less than a minute in front of the judge once their case was called, and most received sentences of time already served in government custody, so they were back in CBP holding cells in short order. In the meantime, however, DHS, the federal government department that includes CBP, had deemed their children to be unaccompanied. DHS agents not only knew exactly where the parents were but also knew that the parents would quickly return to CBP detention. Even so, the department treated the brief change in custody as meaning that parents were not “available” to provide care. Unaccompanied migrant children are entitled to specific protections. In response to a court case settled in 1997, Flores v. Reno, care of unaccompanied children is the responsibility of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A 2008 anti-trafficking law requires DHS to transfer unaccompanied children to ORR expeditiously, usually within 72 hours. The forcible family separation policy weaponized these requirements. Keeping families together is, in the vast majority of these types of cases, in children's best interests. But instead of making every effort to keep families together, DHS transferred the children it had separated to ORR, without planning for or putting measures in place that would enable authorities to reunite them with their parents. Discussions about separating children from their parents at the border began less than a month after President Trump took office. One federal prosecutor commented in early 2017, “History would not judge that kindly.” 2 In March 2017, after Reuters broke the story that family separation was under consideration, a DHS staffer emailed Allen Blume, the department’s budget director, to say, “I would be truly grateful if you could tell me this isn’t being seriously considered.” 3 This report is based on a review of public and internal government documents, legal proceedings, and the findings of DHS, DOJ, and HHS internal investigations, drawing on Human Rights Watch’s extensive interviews with forcibly separated children and parents in 2018 and 2019. It finds that the forcible separation of children from their parents was a deliberate, targeted policy choice taken even though the architects of the policy knew or should have known that it would inflict anguish and suffering on families. Forcible separation of children from their families inflicted harms that were severe and foreseeable. Once parents realized they would not be immediately reunited with their children, they were distraught. Some children sobbed uncontrollably. Many felt abandoned. Nearly all were bewildered, not least because immigration officials would not tell them where their parents were or gave responses that proved to be lies. Children forcibly separated from their parents experienced anxiety, had nightmares, regressed to earlier developmental stages, or found it difficult to trust others and form attachments. Some lashed out. Others stopped speaking.

New York: Human Rights Watch, 2024, 145p.

By Mary Holper

Alleged mandatory immigration detainees are unable to access federal court review of whether they are illegally detained without a bond hearing. The conviction that causes a detainee to be deportable also causes mandatory detention, so that the substantive findings in the deportation litigation path and detention litigation path overlap, even though their consequences differ. In this situation, habeas courts invoke 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(9)— the “zipper clause”—a 1996 statute barring habeas petitions. With § 1252(b)(9), Congress intended to “zip” all claims “arising from any action taken or proceeding brought to remove” a noncitizen into a single circuit court petition for review of a final removal order. But the detention and deportation litigation paths are two sides of an unmatched zipper. One path leads to deportation while the other leads to detention without a bond hearing pending the decision on deportation.

This article exposes a problem that, while under-litigated in immigration detention law, is robbing alleged mandatory detainees of their right to access habeas corpus in order to challenge their illegal detention. As a solution, this article proposes the “Great Writ,” habeas corpus, as a remedy. Because the alleged mandatory detainees do not seek a review of their removal orders, and seek only release from custody, they invoke the “core” of habeas corpus. Although a federal appellate court will ultimately review the substantive legal question that causes both their deportation and detention, that review comes too little, and too late. Thus, it provides no adequate substitute for habeas corpus because there is no meaningful opportunity to demonstrate, to a politically independent adjudicator, that the noncitizen is illegally detained. For these detainees, § 1252(b)(9) has proven to be an ill-fitted zipper that allows illegal executive detention to continue for months and years. If the core of the Suspension Clause is to mean anything, it must guard these detainees’ liberty interests.

Boston College Law School, Boston College Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No. 634, 2024. 53p.

Edited by Jakub Bijak

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This unique book provides a practical and interdisciplinary blueprint for determining quantitative scenarios of future international migration. Focusing on complexity and uncertainty as the defining challenges of migration, it explores how scenario building can be used to inform and underpin effective migration policy and practice.

Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA, 2024, 185p.

By Christopher L. Foote

The US unemployment rate has drifted higher since early 2023, even though growth in payroll employment has been strong over this period. Some commentators have noted that the puzzle of rising unemployment amid rapid hiring can be explained by a large increase in immigration, which would raise population growth and allow firms to hire large numbers of new (immigrant) workers without dipping into the unemployment pool. This paper uses a source of administrative data that is directly related to the labor market—immigrant applications for work permits—to estimate the immigrant labor inflow in 2023 and 2024. The surge in new work permit applications in these two years supports the large immigration estimates based on other administrative data from the Department of Homeland Security, including the significant immigration increase recently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office.

Boston: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2024. 27p.

By CJ McKinney, Melanie Gower

The UK has agreements with some countries for the return of people lacking legal residence. These agreements take various forms and are not usually published.

The attached briefing lists known agreements and links to the text where available. The government has confirmed the existence of some form of agreement with 24 countries since 2021, some recent and some struck up to 20 years ago:

In 2021, the government confirmed that it has formal returns agreements with Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, China, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Iraq, Kuwait, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Korea, South Sudan, Switzerland and Vietnam. That accounts for 16 countries, excluding the deal with Afghanistan because it has been inoperable in practice since regime change later in 2021.

Since 2021, the government has signed formal returns agreements with Albania, Georgia, Serbia, Moldova and Pakistan. These five replaced European Union agreements with those countries in which the UK took part while an EU member.

In 2021, the UK and India agreed a migration and mobility partnership that included provisions on returns.

In 2024, the UK and Bangladesh announced an informal returns agreement described as standard operating procedures.

In 2020, the UK and Ireland set up an informal returns agreement covering asylum seekers (rather than British or Irish citizens), described as non-legally binding operational arrangements.

There may well be other informal or even formal agreements, the existence of which has not been disclosed. The arrangement with Ireland was not announced at the time and only came to public attention in 2024.

Agreements made in the form of a treaty are published and laid before Parliament, but the government is not required to publish a memorandum of understanding or operational protocol. It has refused, for example, to disclose the contents of the 2022 Pakistan agreement.

London: UK House of Commons Library, 2024. 10p.

By Abby Córdova, Jonathan Hiskey, Mary Malone, and Diana Orcés

U.S. efforts to control unauthorized crossings of its southwest border have long rested on the idea of deterrence — if migrants know that a border is dangerous to cross and the likelihood of deportation is high, they will be dissuaded from trying in the first place. Despite the seemingly intuitive logic of this strategy, and the billions of dollars invested in it, deterrence efforts largely have failed, with the number of border crossings in recent years exceeding those of 30 years ago.

To understand why this decades-old, bipartisan deterrence strategy has proven ineffective, the authors focus on individuals from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras who have previous migration experience, with a vast majority of them seeking entry into the U.S. These individuals have direct knowledge of the difficulties and dangers a border crossing poses, yet many report plans to try to cross the border again. To understand why they persist, the authors rely on survey data specifically collected to better understand the root causes of international migration.

Journal on Migration and Human SecurityVolume 12, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 160-181

By BRIAN BLACKWELL, COLIN CAPRARA, JANEY ROUNTREE, ROBERT SANTILLANO, DANA VANDERFORD, CLAIRE BATTIS

Homelessness continues to be a major problem in California, and new approaches to addressing it are urgently needed. This report brings to light an innovative predictive model for homelessness prevention that is showing promising results. The data reveals that this approach — being used for the first time in California and the United States — reaches individuals who are outside of the usual preventive safety net at critical junctures in their lives. Timing is everything — and the Homelessness Prevention Unit connects at-risk people to crucial services and support that could help them avoid homelessness. Consider the scope of the problem: more than 75,000 people experience homelessness in Los Angeles County on any given night in 2024. This represents a 9% increase since 2022 and a 43% increase since 2018. Clearly, long-term solutions to homelessness require not just housing people experiencing homelessness but also preventing homelessness before it occurs. A statewide survey in California revealed that most people experiencing homelessness believe that a one-time payment of $5,000 to $10,000 would have resolved their rapidly escalating financial crises and prevented them from experiencing homelessness. Existing homelessness prevention programs typically include one-time cash assistance ranging on average between $1,000 to $5,000 and short-term direct services such as legal assistance. Several studies have found this approach to be effective at reducing homelessness. Yet research also highlights how difficult it is to ensure that scarce prevention resources primarily reach people who will experience homelessness if they do not receive this help. In partnership with Los Angeles County, the California Policy Lab (CPL) is researching strategies to address this challenge, including developing a data-driven predictive model that can proactively identify people at highest risk of experiencing homelessness. In many prevention programs, participants self-identify as being at risk of homelessness and are then screened into programs based on eligibility criteria or surveys that ask questions about risk factors. CPL’s predictive model, however, analyzes de-identified data to proactively identify people at high risk of homelessness. Our research finds that people identified by the predictive model are not connected to typical prevention programs, indicating that both approaches are valuable and reach different people. To test whether this model could be used to better target prevention resources, in 2020, Los Angeles County created the Homelessness Prevention Unit (HPU) operating out of the Housing for Health division of the Department of Health Services (DHS) in close collaboration with the Chief Information Office (CIO) and Department of Mental Health (DMH). A County seed funding investment in the HPU made it possible to pilot an innovative approach to homelessness prevention that offers flexible cash assistance and tailored case management to individuals and families predicted by CPL’s model to be at the highest risk of experiencing homelessness. Because the HPU is located within the Los Angeles County health system, CPL’s model is focused on people who recently received DHS or DMH services and who are observed as stably housed in County administrative data. This group includes nearly 100,000 people over the course of a year (the “eligible population”). CPL uses the model to produce lists multiple times a year of people with the highest risk of homelessness. The lists are anonymized and rank-ordered from highest to lowest risk of homelessness. CPL sends the high-risk lists to the CIO, where County staff match each person’s anonymized record to a County medical record ID. The CIO then transfers the lists to the HPU so that they can identify names, addresses, and contact info of the patients listed. HPU staff then screen out some people on the risk lists that other data sources indicate are currently experiencing homelessness and are therefore ineligible. For eligible individuals, HPU staff attempt to contact them, and, if they are willing, enroll them in the intervention. The HPU serves between 400 to 600 people per year. The intervention includes rapidly delivered, flexible cash assistance, tailored case management, and referrals to other services, such as mental health care, workforce development, and legal services. This policy report provides an overview of: (1) CPL’s predictive model, including data sources and engineering; (2) the equity of the predictive model; (3) outreach and enrollment in the HPU; (4) the HPU’s design and service model; and (5) how CPL will evaluate the impact of the HPU program in a randomized control trial

Los Angeles: The California Policy Lab , 2024. 50p.

Edited by Santino Regilme, Salvador F.

More than three decades have passed since the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, yet children's rights and dignity still confront profound challenges worldwide. This book delves deep into this complex issue, meticulously examining the causes and consequences of contemporary crises in children's rights and welfare. Distinguishing itself from conventional literature and public discourse on human rights, this multidisciplinary volume offers an unparalleled global and interdisciplinary perspective. It defies traditional disciplinary boundaries, embracing an analytically eclectic and interdisciplinary approach to comprehending the intricate challenges faced by children today. This book wholeheartedly acknowledges that the issues affecting children are intricately interwoven within an intricate web of social, cultural, and historical factors, thereby requiring a holistic and problem-centric viewpoint. Far from the mainstream narrative, this anthology spotlights the frequently overlooked crises in children's rights, bringing to light those thematic and policy blind spots that have languished in obscurity. It champions an unyielding global and transnational outlook, recognizing that the contemporary predicaments confronting children are not solely products of local or national influences but are profoundly shaped by the forces and interactions of a global scale. This book uniquely contributes to children's rights scholarship by exploring children's rights and dignity through a broader lens, emphasizing the impact of politics, culture, social conflicts, and geographic variations. This timely and indispensable work serves as an invaluable resource for scholars, policymakers, and advocates dedicated to advancing the cause of children's rights on the grand stage of global governance.

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2024.

By John Power,  Sean Phillips, Stuart Carroll

The scale and volume of challenges facing the new ministerial team at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) necessitates a significant turnaround operation to enhance NHS productivity and performance. Indeed, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care used his first public statement to reflect that “the policy of this department is that the NHS is broken”. Amid operational pressures (including long waits for care), poor patient satisfaction (at its lowest levels since the early 1980s), high-profile cases of abuse and anaemic productivity growth since the pandemic, the way that the NHS is managed and led is back firmly in the spotlight. The work of managers – particularly non-clinical, operational managers – working across the NHS is often invisible to the public, but touches almost every aspect of health and care delivery from the implementation of electronic patient records and upgrading the hospital estate to planning rotas for doctors and nurses. Yet the present debate concerning health and care management is often driven by a weak or anecdotal evidential basis. In a recent interview, the Health Secretary reflected he was “unconvinced by the majority of research…which suggests the NHS is under-managed”. A recent study concludes that “there is little existing evidence to support either this narrative or counterclaims.” As the 2015 Smith Review noted, management capacity and capability is “under examined” in healthcare planning. Politicians (of all stripes) alongside commentators in the media have in recent years blamed poor performance on “NHS managers”, whilst holding more positive opinions about “front line” staff. A recent analysis from the Policy Unit at King’s College London reveals half of the public believe there are “too many managers in the NHS”.. Some healthcare professionals also reflect this view, perceiving non-clinical managers to be a challenge to professional autonomy and authority. In the public policy debate, too much emphasis is placed on discussion about the volume of managers working in the NHS: the narrative that either simply expanding the headline numbers of ‘managers’ or in scaling back a ‘bloated bureaucracy’ will deliver the necessary service improvement and efficiency gains. A greater focus on management capability is needed, as is a deeper understanding of the permissions and incentives which enable or inhibit improved performance and productivity. We also need to re are employed between NHS England (NHSE) and DHSC. In addition to this, the recently-published Independent Review of NHS Performance, authored by Lord Darzi, finds that “regulatory type organisations now employ some 7,000 staff, or 35 per provider trust, having doubled in size over the past 20 years”. The “right balance of management resources in different parts of the structure” is needed, he concludes. Such an assessment must not fix its attention solely upon the management of hospitals (as important as this is) but must also consider the requirements of the healthcare system as a whole – particularly primary and community healthcare services whose management and leadership requirements are less frequently discussed in policy debates, but where expectations for the transformation of services are great and there are unique challenges and circumstances to be addressed given these are far more devolved and dispersed care settings. Moreover, we should not solely investigate roles, but must also consider the architecture and “organisational culture” which influences activity within the NHS as well as the NHS’s interaction with Government departments and arms-length bodies. The focus and purpose of this report, therefore, is two-fold: 1. Firstly, to present a more detailed portrait of the state of NHS management today to inform the discussion around about future reform. How is management distributed across the country and across organisations? Would a greater volume of managers overall deliver improved performance? Are there particular skillsets we are lacking? 2. Secondly, to set out the case for change and to make a series of recommendations for reform.  

London: Policy Exchange, 2024. 62p.

By George Fishman

Summary

• The Immigration Act of 1924 ushered in a four-decade-long Great Pause in mass immigration. This allowed the United States to assimilate the 20-plus million immigrants who arrived during the “Great Wave” that had begun in the 1880s. And the Act fostered a national economic climate conducive to the flowering of the American Dream, especially for Black Americans. Economists have concluded that from 1940 to 1970, largely paralleling the Great Pause, the average real earnings of white men rose by 210 percent and those of Black men rose by 406 percent.

• Not only “progressives”, “liberals”, “conservatives”, and “racists” supported restrictionist policies. So did many Black leaders. A leading Black newspaper concluded that the dramatic decrease in immigration during the First World War “gave [Blacks] the opportunity to get a foothold in the economic world”, but that “there have been many grave doubts about their ability to keep this foothold when fierce competition set in again”. Another proclaimed that the war “showed us just how keen a competitor cheap European labor had been for” Black workers.

• Roy Beck, founder of NumbersUSA, recently set forth an audacious hypothesis that the 1924 Act “was the greatest federal action in U.S. history — other than the Civil War Constitutional Amendments — in advancing the economic interests of the descendants of American slavery, and perhaps of all American workers”. The Act led to a tighter labor market, resulting in an openness and even a desire by employers both North and South to recruit Black workers. This, in turn, opened the door for the Great Migration of millions of Blacks out of the South and helped pave the way for the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. And it turned America into a middle-class society for whites and for Blacks. Beck’s hypothesis is not only plausible, it is the most compelling reading of the historical evidence.

• But not only did the 1924 Act dramatically reduce immigration, it also established country-by-country immigration quotas in reaction to the vast increase in immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe since the 1880s. Sen. David Reed argued that “[i]t was natural that the[ new immigrants] should not understand our institutions” and that they were “wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans … untrained in self-government”. Thus, “it was best for America that our incoming immigrants should hereafter be of the same races as those of us who are already here”. The debate over the 1924 Act focused to a large extent on often ugly racial rationales for restriction.

• In 1965, Congress, in its zeal to remove the demon of national origins quotas, restarted mass immigration. Congress could have easily accomplished the former without the latter, but it did not do so. The results have been disastrous for our country, with a 19 percent drop in the average real earnings of white men (from 1970 to 2014) and a 32 percent drop for Black men.

Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, 2024.

By Alexandre Bish, Hervé Borrion, Ella Cockbain, Sonia Toubaline,

Since the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ in 2015, there has been intense policy interest around irregular migration along the Central Mediterranean Route to Europe. Despite increased research focus on this route, the details and geographical intricacies of these migration journeys have scarcely been examined. In this study, we investigate the what, where, and how of the journeys of 71 people who traveled from Libya across the Mediterranean Sea to Malta. To do so, we break down their journeys into scripts (i.e. sequences of activities) and represent them as a composite script graph. We find that journeys were long – 18 months on average – and circuitous, involving diverse and complex geographical paths. Smuggling, brokerage, and working during transit were key aspects of most journeys. Worryingly, two-thirds of participants experienced detention and/or forced labor before reaching Malta. By pinpointing where and how harm occurs, the composite script graph can support policymakers in reducing harm, including by accounting for the possible harm that interventions may cause, directly or as a result of displacement.

Criminology & Criminal Justice, Oct. 2024.  Online first.

Edited by Ingrid Muenstermann

This book demonstrates the tide of change of immigration and emigration. Societies of the northern part of the globe, which had previously sent people to developing countries in the southern hemisphere, are experiencing a never-ceasing influx of registered and unregistered people from the southern part of the globe. In thirteen chapters written by experts from all over the world, this book explores emigration and immigration during the last three centuries.

London: InTechOpen, 2023. 223p.